Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday October 04, 2012 @05:39PM
from the when-visions-collide dept.

Mark Hachman writes in Slash Datacenter that the Sparc T5 chip Oracle announced earlier this year apparently won't be ready until sometime in 2013. John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Oracle, presented at Oracle Open World a chart outlining highlights of Oracle's plans for the future.
"But Fowler also skipped over some bad news: an apparent delay for the Sparc T5. A year ago, Oracle’s Sun division announced the Sparc T4—and according to Fowler, Oracle chief Larry Ellison set a very high bar for the next iteration: double the performance while maintaining app compatibility on an annual basis. Apparently, that didn’t quite happen with the T5; Oracle had the opportunity to announce a T5-based server, and didn’t. That’s a bit of bad news for the Sun design team, which already had to watch Intel’s Xeon chief, Diane Bryant, give the preceding keynote. ... As detailed at this year’s Hot Chips conference, the T5 combines 16 CPU cores running at 3.6 GHz on a 28-nm manufacturing process. Continuing the trend of hardware acceleration of specific functions, Sun executives claimed the chip would lead in on-chip encryption acceleration, with support for asymmetric (public key) encryption, symmetric encryption, hashing up to SHA-512, plus a hardware random number generator."

Actually the fine article is about hardware; processors to be specific.
If I was heavily invested in Solaris I would be interested in the Sparc T5. Here are some excerpts from this Register article: [theregister.co.uk]

The Sparc T5 chip is more than just a shrunken Sparc T4 processor, which Oracle revealed at last year's Hot Chips conference and then started shipping in systems as 2011 wound down. The Sparc T4s had eight of the new S3 generation of Sparc cores, and the 3GHz clock speed and tweaks to the instruction pipeline were designed to make it much better at single-threaded work than its Sparc T chip predecessors. The Sparc T4 is manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp using its 40 nanometer processes, and the sixteen-core Sparc T5 chip uses the popular 28 nanometer processes from TSMC that a number of processor and graphics card makers are employing in their latest devices.

Getting back to sixteen cores on the Sparc T5 die, each with eight threads for running heavily threaded work, is a good use of the process shrink. Oracle could have gone a simpler route and double-stuffed the sockets with slightly modified Sparc T4 designs, akin to what IBM is doing with its Power7+ processors in some server configurations, to get to that sixteen core level. But, for whatever reason, Oracle wants to have all of the cores on the same die and running on the same crossbar interconnect.

But since I haven't look at the non X86 chips in awhile my question is...what advantage do they give over the AMD and Intel X86 cores? i mean I could understand using MIPS, SPARC, POWER back in the day because X86 was slower at certain tasks but now the amount of IPC on the Intel side is just nuts and AMD is going with an insane numbers of cores for cheap...so what's the selling point?

I mean I can understand those that already have significant resources tied up in SPARC as it'd be cheaper to stay with what they have than to switch, but what do they use as selling points to get new customers?

But since I haven't look at the non X86 chips in awhile my question is...what advantage do they give over the AMD and Intel X86 cores? i mean I could understand using MIPS, SPARC, POWER back in the day because X86 was slower at certain tasks but now the amount of IPC on the Intel side is just nuts and AMD is going with an insane numbers of cores for cheap...so what's the selling point?

I mean I can understand those that already have significant resources tied up in SPARC as it'd be cheaper to stay with what they have than to switch, but what do they use as selling points to get new customers?

For certain workloads it really shines. A couple of years ago, web servers was given as a prime example. Tons and tons of threads, none of them that powerful, but good for workloads where you have lots and lots of small-tasks running in parallel.

If you don't have that kind of workload, obviously it isn't attractive. But if you have the right kind of workload, you should be interested.

Oracle SGBDR and options licences price is the key to understand why SPARC still matter.

For the same processing power, T4 cpu need less core than any x86 concurrent.A client using spatial, partitionning and olap will need to rack up 66k$ per core (list price). Note that the licence requiered for a single core is more expensive than the server.

If you add that you only need to pay the licences you use on solaris thanks to the containers, and you can easyly imagine that a T4 solution usually is 2 times cheaper than a x86 solution.

Do I need to add the greater MTBF of these T4 machines or that it is the oracle developpement plateform of choice (thuss receive patches the first, windows is a 3rd cityzen in that context) ?

Things like the ability to park threads in the OS that are idle. To shift loads from core to core to allow cores to be shifted into hyper single-threaded mode.The ability to encrypt/decrypt dual 10Gbit communications at wire speed (ie no delays at all).The ability to do all SSL encryption/decryption with zero delays or CPU overhead.The ability to handle hundreds of java threads efficiently, each with their own dedicated VCPU.

The list goes on and on. Most of these you cannot get (yet) with an Intel or AMD

At this point, I'd say that all chips are a wash. I mean, once multiprocessing became mainstream among processors, there was nothing that a processor family couldn't achieve just by dumping cores @ the problem. In the case of SPARC, they happen to be better, as others have pointed out, in terms of multithreading applications, which is good for large databases and similar apps. Really good for Oracle.

I'm sure there are some marketing and political factors. However, one of the reasons why Oracle have spun up their own Linux distro is to they can have a custom kernel. There are several patches in it that are not in the Redhat supplied kernel including some to better support databases running within virtual machines.

But they have a Solaris kernel already, which they can fine-tune to whatever. With Linux, they are forced to give it away. With a BSD, they may not have had to, but there remains the old school SVR4 vs BSD4.4 issues, and I don't see Oracle thinking that the latter is for any reason preferrable to the former.

You're right, they do have Solaris. However, Oracle developed their own Linux before the Sun acquisition. They clearly don't feel it makes sense at this time to focus just on Solaris. In all honesty, I don't think they mind having their kernel patches shared. In fact, I expect what they really want is for those patches to be part of the official Redhat kernel. Maybe once that's been achieved they would drop their own linux distro.

Unix was only needed on the desktop when Windows was utter crap (ie. Win 3.1 and Win95/98). With the NT line up to 7 Windows is good enough and it comes with the cheapest possible HW. The Unix vendors never tried to attack WNT by selling competitvely priced Unix desktops. HP, SUN, IBM and SGI were never interested in selling a 999$ Unix machine.

So they traded short term profits vor long term existence, essentially.

Why, what about BSD, Solaris & others? Seems to me that Oracle could easily target this market w/ its SPARC servers. In fact, Oracle could even load Oracle Linux on its SPARC servers and sell them into this space.

This kind of "wide" multithreading of individual cores is excellent for applications which are themselves fairly lightweight but which make intensive use of devices that can have (realtively) high latency. Network file service and RAID control are both applications like this -- any given thread is likely to spend a significant fraction of its time in "device wait", waiting for a hard-drive to seek to the right sector, so its overall "duty cycle" (i.e. the fraction of its lifetime for which it needs to actu

Before Fowler became an Oracle employee, he was in charge of the hardware division at Sun. And before that, he was in charage of x64 systems. I was working there at the time, and the word from on high was that putting the x64 guy in charge was a signal about our future direction.

Which of course, didn't happen. Sun's sales channels continued to view x64 systems as a way of migrating people to SPARC vis Solaris-on-x64. Which all our customers, who were already heavily invested in Windows and Linux, had no interest in. My big hope for the Oracle takeover was that Oracle's sales org (aside from being bigger than all of Sun) would be smarter than that and push x64 systems.

But Oracle has dratically reduced the models of x64 systems they sell. Officially, that's about a leaner product line and ending the special relationship with AMD. But I'm beginning to expect that the SPARC koolaid is as popular in Oracle as it was in Sun.

Glacial indeed, if they haven't already done it. Like the other 99% of the industry.

One has to be really dense not to see this trend. ALPHA is gone. MIPS is only used in embedded devices. Itanium and POWER are strictly legacy products. And yet people still believe that SPARC can survive in the server space.

I'd be sad too if I still worked at Sun. But not only does the failure of this product line no longer affect me, even abandoning SPARC completely would not save it. Computers are Dead [slashdot.org].

I'm not sure about that, but one big issue with power, itanium and sparc is: NONE OF THEM HAVE LOW END SYSTEMS TO SPUR NEW DEMAND.

I mean fuck, seriously? If each of those archs had a current-generation workstation, nothing fancy, a couple cores, probably with basically no cache and such compared to the high end models (maybe even just reject bin parts from the high end systems), a decent selection of PCIe and maybe a few PCI slots, and run inside a standard 120V 15A circuit, I'd look into buying one for up

Five years ago your comment would have made a lot of sense to me, but now you're talking about how everyone's gone X86 during the first massive movement away from X86 the industry's seen... smartphones and tablets are all computers that run on ARM processors, they're cleaning X86's clock in the only rapidly expanding market. And ARM's next core design is aimed at servers.

For the first time, Windows compatibility is mattering less and less as many users only use the web and web apps on their computers - opening the door to competing processors for the first time since the late 80's. At the same time, PC's continue to represent a smaller and smaller share of new CPU's, which are migrating to data centers, smartphones, and pads, which are even less dependent on X86 compatibility.

For the first time, the computational penalty of X86 instruction set translation for RISC cores may not outweigh the compatibility benefit for a significant portion of users. Increasingly, customers don't care about compatibility with existing X86 codebases. Like ARM, anyone with a new processor with compelling performance per watt might actually be able to sell the thing, without everyone assuming it's worthless if it won't run Windows.

Also, I wouldn't quite characterize POWER as a strictly legacy product, since IBM introduced the latest iteration, the power 7+, in August 2012, and is currently selling 15 different systems using Power7 processors. Not to mention the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, and not-even-out-yet Wii U that are all POWER based systems.

Yeah, my obsession with the x64 versus everything else war is becomming less and less relevant. Mobile devices are indeed about ARM (though Intel would like to change that). And I agree with you that web applications are chiping away at Windows dominance.

But ARM servers? People have been trying to sell those as long as ARM has been around. ARM advocates are insisting that the latest improvements will give them the edge they need, but the factors that keep the data centers full of x64 systems have not change

I work for IBM, in the Midrange space, (and if it is not Mainframe or AS/400, it is Midrange, unless it is a embedded system/appliance) so I see tons of it coming through the pipeline, especially when the customer wants an enterprise sized install, like a Data Warehouse.

Fast as x86 CPU's are, if you need I/O speed, it is still RISC systems, including SUN and HP.

AIX is still IBM's premier UNIX based OS for the enterprise. RHEL is Linux solution. from Enterprise to desktop.

I'm sure it's a great OS. But is anybody buying it? There's certainly no place for it in the cloud-oriented data center.

Anybody who's worked in the computer industry for any length of time knows that "great technology" is not the same as "stuff people want to buy". Computer history is littered with the corpses of products that were technologically wonderful but which couldn't find a market.

AIX was launched in 1986. This was a very fortuitous time; on the one hand, it was a modern Unix-style (being Unix!) OS

What exactly did OS/2 run on other than PCs? POWERstations? Not that I recall. AS/400s? Nope! What else could it run on?

For the POWER line-up, there is Linux, and then, there is BSD - I believe that all the big 3 are supported there. So IBM has a choice of at least 4 OSs to put on POWER, aside from AIX. It's a shame that OS/2-PPC never happened, but maybe osFree could happen, if the L4 microkernel is ported to POWER, and then POWER could run a Presentation Manager based OS.

When did OS/2 run on the PPC or RS/6000? A different OS called Workplace OS - which was Presentation Manager on top of Mach 3.0 was developed, but IBM pulled the plug on it before it was ready. Yeah, AS/400 was migrated to the RS/6000, but unfortunately, never OS/2. Otherwise OS/2 on PPC, w/ full IBM backing, might have been a great hit, and might even have attracted the Mac clonemakers like Power Computing, Motorola CPG and Umax to switch to them once Jobs cancelled the MacOS licensing.

But ARM servers? People have been trying to sell those as long as ARM has been around.

No they haven't. ARM2 was definitely a mobile / desktop chip. Up until AMR6 they were mainly aiming at this same market, and then focussed almost exclusively on embedded. Cortex A8 was the first that anyone seriously thought about putting in a server, but ARM wasn't pushing it in that direction. Cortex A15 is the first chip that they've designed aimed at servers and we're only just seeing shipping silicon for it now (and most of that is aimed at tablets). ARM has definitely identified the low-power ser

It was used as a desktop chip. (Don't recall a lot of mobile devices in 1987.)

You might remember the Apple Newton. The reason ARM was spun out from Acorn was that Apple wanted to use their CPU, but didn't want to buy it from a direct competitor. Having a spin-out that provided CPUs for both of them was fine.

What prevented it from going into a rack-mount server?

No one tried it? It simply wasn't a market ARM aimed at. The two operating systems that ran on it were NewtonOS and RiscOS, neither of which was aimed at servers. They could have ported something else, but Linux didn't exist for 4 years and wasn't really credible for a decade

. But those of us who are willing to wait a year or two for the latest GTA to be ported to the PC just don't care.

Good point, but that's more of a consumer view than a business view. Businesses are usually working on the here and now, or the near future, and cost effectiveness. Your view leans toward less timeliness to gain the cost savings. I have both views, one for my personal equipment, the same as yours, and one for my company, the timely need.

You also make some good discussion about x64 compatibility, but consider services and apps vs. hardware. If you're connecting to my web site or my cloud services, you do

If you're connecting to my web site or my cloud services, you don't know what hardware I'm running on, but you DO care that it's fast enough to meet your needs. So why would you care whether my hardware is x64 compatible as long as your x64 systems talk to it just fine?

Of course I don't care. But I'm not the person who's building the infrastructure that makes this web application work. And that person wants commodity systems: lower upfront cost, lower TCO.

IBM Power systems also run Linux.

As I already pointed out, everything runs Linux. But how many people are buying POWER to run Linux?

Well, at least IBM is trying to push Linux on POWER itself. At Sun, we left Linux on SPARC to Canonical. But I don't see either taking off any time soon.

If you're connecting to my web site or my cloud services, you don't know what hardware I'm running on, but you DO care that it's fast enough to meet your needs. So why would you care whether my hardware is x64 compatible as long as your x64 systems talk to it just fine?

Of course I don't care. But I'm not the person who's building the infrastructure that makes this web application work. And that person wants commodity systems: lower upfront cost, lower TCO.

Commodity systems do not always mean lower TCO. TCO is based on a lot more than just hardware, which is normally a small fraction of a system's costs.

IBM Power systems also run Linux.

As I already pointed out, everything runs Linux. But how many people are buying POWER to run Linux?

Well, at least IBM is trying to push Linux on POWER itself. At Sun, we left Linux on SPARC to Canonical. But I don't see either taking off any time soon.

Very well, but you also said of IBM, "When they start selling POWER systems that run Linux, then we can talk." I was merely responding to that, fyi. I'm certainly not putting words in your mouth.

TCO is based on a lot more than just hardware, which is normally a small fraction of a system's costs.

Oh, is that why they call it "total cost of ownership"? Gee, that never occurred to me!

The post-purchase costs of non-standard systems are pretty substantial. I found that out first hand when I tried to be a good Sun employee and run my internal wiki on Solaris instead of Linux. Kept running into TWiki plugins that didn't work Solaris because they depended on Perl libraries that had only been tested on Linux.

For the first time, the computational penalty of X86 instruction set translation for RISC cores may not outweigh the compatibility benefit for a significant portion of users.

Yes and no.

Yes, in that it's always mattered. Intel can never be power competitive in the low end due to the expense of the x86 instruction decoder. Then again, neither can ARM which is why static 14/8 bitters like PIC dominate the truly low end. In the mid range ARM and others (but mostly ARM) will not be displaced by Intel for exactly that reason.

ARM dominate all the way to the beginning of the high end. However, once one hits the high end, and single thread performance goes up, again the decoder becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of the energy usage. The OoO unint and execution units dominate, as the OoO unit has to expend a lot of energy to keep the energy hungry execution units fed while they're ungated.

Users are now beginning to care about the high end on their phones, just about.

For fun, compare the FLPOS/Watt of an i7 Ivy Bridge to any other general purpose CPU. The Ivy Bridge one does surprisingly well, in fct I think it's pretty much a winner. Certianly compared to ARM. The reason is that as the performance goes up, the instruction decoder begines to pale in to insignificance.

It's the same old argument as always.

Intel will never hit the mid to low end, but the penalty almost disappears on the high end, and Intels better process and expertise in branch prediction dominates.

For now, phones are bumping into the bottom of the top end. In 5 to 10 years they will be firmly in it, and the landscape will be very different. In 10 to 15 years, cheaper smartphones (e.g. spiritual successors to something like the Galaxy Ace) will be comfortably inot the high end.

Arm will continue to dominate the upper low end to the top of the middle because of the decoder. But phones things will be moving well into the top end.

I'm defining low/middle/high by absoute performance and relative power tradeoffs between parts of CPUs.

Alpha & PA-RISC are indeed gone. Itanium too is almost there, although it could still have a life in supercomputers. SPARC's real strength was in the workstation space, as well as the database server space of Oracles. Indeed, there was a time when SPARCstations were ubiquitious for CAD engineering work, such as Cadence, Verilog and the HDLs.

POWER pretty much owns the games console market, having conquered it from MIPS. MIPS now has the router and tablet markets, the latter where it's a better alte

it would be nice if POWER returned to Apple as well - both iPads and Airbooks.

Do you see that happening? Apple must have had a lot of motivation to make the painful transition from POWER to commodity. The transition back would be just as painful, and I don't see their motivation.

x64 owns the desktop and the data center. ARM owns the mobile space. Anybody who thinks that's going to change any time soon as a bad case of the if-onlys.

Wow. Have you actually used Oracle for a data need that actually requires it? How about a T4 SuperCluster? No? Really? That's probably why you're convinced that your comments like "Someone is still buying that shit" and the like are just hilarious. They're not. In fact they show your immaturity and lack of understanding of just how large and complex some data-sets can get. We've got racks of Exadatas being fed by racks of Superclusters and backing up to racks of ZFS backup appliances. We've also go

No, I haven't used Oracle for a data need that actually requires it. I'm not aware of what a data need that would actually require it would look like. I do work on high speed market data delivery systems. Top end stuff for a internationally relevant company (can't say who, but it's not Bloomberg). Mining databases doesn't really factor into the equation. In fact, all of our stuff is moving away from SPARC simply because we need inexpensive powerful processors, not thousands of threads all running at 1.

government agencies, all the better to track you. And oracle financials is popular in the business world. next iteration we are probably going to sparc not because we want to but because of crappy oracle contracts.
yes it is a shit solution and a shit product, but who's running to great plains now a MS product...?????
trapped, that is what we are.:(

Processors are very much a Yoda situation of "Do or do not, there is no try." For high end servers, there is a market for non-x86 stuff. However to be in it, you need to be up on the curve, you need to invest real resources in development. On the other hand you can just get our of it and buy product form someone else, probably Intel but IBM or Hitachi are options. It is expensive, deciding not to compete is 100% valid.

However half-assing it is going to lead to nothing but wasted money. You can't decide you

"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" - Seymour Cray.

The devil is in the details. SPARC has lots of registers, very true. But it needs more user-accessible registers, because its address modes are simpler, and you need to do more address computations in registers. Register windows were like a fully associative cache for a few levels of your call stack... but then you have to save more stuff when you do a context switch, and I suspect they were part o

As someone else said [slashdot.org], "ALPHA is gone. MIPS is only used in embedded devices. Itanium and POWER are strictly legacy products. And yet people still believe that SPARC can survive in the server space."

The cpu markets is headed to support only two kinds of microprocessor: ARM where there is restrictions on power consumption and x86-64 everywhere else. Is there really a viable market for specialised CPUs?

Last time I've used them, SPARCs were general purpose CPUs... and pretty good ones at that. But yes, there's a market for that. For instance, Fujitsu SPARC64 CPUs are currently being used, among others, in the HPC world [theregister.co.uk] for massively parallel simulations.

The article is a link to another slashdot article. Seriously, what the fuck? If you cared, shouldn't you just comment in the original article rather than here? Or post the full text here instead of a summary of a link to another page on slashdot?

I recently bought a Sun Fire T1000 so I could play with Solaris. I found out the hard way that the default logical domain manager in Solaris 11 doesn't support T1 processors. I went to downgrade to the previous ldom software just to find out that software is behind a paywall.

I could use Solaris 10 instead, but I'm screwed out of using their latest and greatest software because of their paywall. I also can't update my firmware due to the same reason.

Yeah, do not buy old Sun hardware thinking that you can get any useful support from third parties, or pick up a cheap support contract suitable for a sysadmin's home box or a dev workstation... or even download firmware for a device that is not covered by your current support contract. That sort of thing went away by or shortly after the time that Oracle bought Sun.

Oracle doesn't really care about ISV support for SPARC, and they probably like it if their big Oracle/SPARC sales included a hefty dose of high

The firmware thing was what caused me to start recommending other server manufacturers. The Sun hardware was actually really nice, well designed, and very stable. The ILOM was great since it was so tightly integrated with the hardware and yet completely out of band, and was included with the server at no real additional cost.

Then Oracle bought Sun and turned off firmware support unless you had an active support contract. That was a big *fuck you* to everyone who bought a bunch of Sun hardware and only ke

It's not a waste. You should be able to run a Linux or BSD on it. Your choices are limited, but you don't have to run solaris. You may also be able to get an open source fork of opensolaris to run on it.

Man, after all of Sun's customers got screwed by Oracle buying them I cant believe people are still investing in Sparc hardware. Sun''s marketshare has gone from 16% in q1-2008 to 4.7% in q1-2012 as HP, IBM and Dell's marketshare have increased. With declines like that; its only a matter of time before Oracle turns away the rest of their server customers by killing off Sparc an Solaris.

Well, they effectively won. Anybody who wants to build their high end solutions around Oracle software now knows not to go w/ Itanium, since Oracle doesn't necessarily have to provide the latest or greatest - they can even provide mediocre support. In the meantime, anybody who does want high end Oracle based solutions is much safer going w/ UltraSPARC or Sparc T5 based solutions than even POWER, MIPS or even Itanium.